no title

U.S. MISSIONS UNDER SEIGE

Yemen boils over, too

U.S. braces for violence after weekly prayers today

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoHani Mohammed | Associated Press photosYemeni protesters climb the gate of the U.S. Embassy in San‘a during a protest about a film ridiculing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. At least four protesters were killed in San‘a and more than 30 were injured, some of them severely.

Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, reeling from this week’s deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, is bracing for another potential eruption of violence in parts of the Muslim world after today’s weekly prayers — traditionally a time of protest in the Middle East and North Africa.

Angry demonstrations over an anti-Islam video already have occurred in Egypt and Yemen, and officials theorize that well-armed Libyan extremists hijacked a similar protest Tuesday in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans and several Libyan security guards were killed. The U.S. put all of its diplomatic missions overseas on high alert, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered an explicit denunciation of the video yesterday as the administration sought to pre-empt further turmoil at its embassies and consulates.

“The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” she said at the State Department. “We absolutely reject its content and message.

“To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.”

Yesterday, young demonstrators in Cairo, Egypt, and San‘a, Yemen, battled government security forces in anti-American protests. At least four protesters were killed and more than 30 were injured, some of them severely, as crowds broke into the U.S. Embassy compound in San‘a. There were no reports of American injuries.

U.S. officials said they suspect the attack earlier in the week in Benghazi may have been only tangentially related to the film. They stressed there had been no warning or intelligence to suggest a threat that would have warranted boosting security, even on the 11th anniversary of the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

The intelligence leading up to the attacks will be examined to “see if there was any way of forecasting this violence,” House Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said yesterday. But he said the focus now “has to be on finding out who is responsible and bringing them to justice.”

Libyan officials have arrested at least four militants suspected of taking part in the attack, and they were closely monitoring others.

As of yesterday morning, U.S. intelligence officials said they think it’s likely that the attack was “opportunistic or spontaneous,” with militants taking advantage of the movie demonstration to launch the assault.

There is also no evidence that the attack was tied to 9/11, one of the officials said. The Libyan-based militant group Ansar al Sharia, however, is the leading suspect for carrying out the violence, possibly with help from al-Qaida’s main African-based offshoot, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

The New York Times, citing a top Libyan security official, reported that the mayhem actually was two attacks — the first one spontaneous and the second highly organized and possibly aided by anti-U.S. infiltrators of the young Libyan government.

Wanis el-Sharif, a deputy interior minister, said Ambassador Chris Stevens and a second U.S. diplomat, Sean Smith, were killed in the initial attack, which began as a demonstration by civilians and militants. The protest escalated into an assault by as many as 200 people, some armed with grenades, who set the consulate on fire.

The second wave, el-Sharif said, was hours later, when the staff had been spirited to a safe house in a villa a mile away. At that point, a team of Libyan security officials was evacuating them into a convoy.

El-Sharif said the second attack was an ambush on the convoy by assailants armed with rocket-propelled grenades and who apparently knew the route the vehicles were taking. The other two Americans — identified yesterday as Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, both former Navy SEALs — were killed in that assault.

But one Libyan guard who was injured in the attack said yesterday that the consulate area was quiet — “there wasn’t a single ant outside,” he said — until about 9:35 p.m., when as many as 125 armed men descended on the compound.

The men lobbed grenades into the compound, wounding the guard, then stormed through the facility’s main gate before moving to one of the many villas that make up the consulate compound.

U.S. officials now are deeply concerned that extremists may take advantage of non-violent demonstrations to copycat the Benghazi raid, or that otherwise peaceful protesters may be incited to attack because of the video, particularly today.

Violent crowds “can be mobilized on the spur of the moment, set off by a spark,” especially in places such as Egypt and Libya where ruling strongmen have just fallen, said retired U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte yesterday.

Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood called for demonstrations after prayers today as did authorities in Iran and the Gaza strip. Large protests were expected in Baghdad and Iraq’s second-largest city, Basra, as well as Amman, Jordan. Israel was stepping up security in anticipation of demonstrations after Muslim prayers.

More than 50 embassies and consulates have released alerts since Wednesday, the State Department said.

Information from McClatchy Newspapers and Reuters was included in this story.